For two years, the licensed therapist has responded as a behavioral health liaison embedded at Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office. The role — as one of seven county liaisons in the field — has become his passion.

“I love my job,” Churchill said at the agency’s headquarters on Soquel Avenue this week after a meeting that gathered information about the rampant calls involving behavioral health conditions or substance-use disorders. Another presentation addressed the agency’s response to dealing with the worst repeat offenders — who resist offered help and often are under the influence of drugs, alcohol or are suffering from behavioral problems.

Churchill knows pretty much all of them.

The sheriff’s office launched the Focused Intervention Team to manage 30 people who dominate local policing resources.

Sgt. William Burnett, who leads the team, gave examples of 20 people already selected as team clients. They even have a dedicated judge to address their troublesome cases. All have substance-use disorders. All are homeless, but that is not why they are part of the program, Sheriff Jim Hart explained.

In the past four weeks, the program’s inception, more than 60 clients were referred. Among them: two with 200 police contacts each, Hart said.

“These are people that are very difficult to manage,” Hart said.

The first goal: Get them suitable for residential-treatment programs.

“A lot of these people aren’t even stable enough to get into a residential-treatment programs,” Burnett said. “That’s what we’re using the program for: to buy us a little time at least to get them into residential-treatment programs.”

Many already have been banned from those programs, which are private operations that use government funding.

These clients are violent and resistant: One offender is court-ordered to stay away from 54 locations. He was booked into jail 43 times last year and 11 times the last 90 days, and received 21 municipal-code citations.

“And this isn’t abnormal,” Burnett said. People who have called 911 reported him yelling, being belligerent, refusing to leave, challenging fights and touching himself. Recent violations include trespassing, resisting an officer, drug and public intoxication.

“We have a sobering center to bypass the jail for a lot of these people. This offender’s not allowed there,” Burnett said. “And recently, he absconded from a residential-treatment program that he was ordered to go to.”

Another client’s many crimes includes throwing his excrement at others.

Undersheriff Craig Wilson said the FIT initiative is not a housing program.

“If we threw house keys, apartment keys at these folks, they wouldn’t stay in them,” Wilson said. “They’d burn them down and run their neighbors out.”

Churchill will continue to work with the department overall. From his perspective, meth addiction — the cheap and widely available drug has a dark allure — is part of the problem.

Heroin rarely results in a law-enforcement call, he said. Except for overdose calls, he added.

“We don’t have any place to put these people,” Hart said. “Our population’s growing. Drug use is growing and it’s rampant. This community has been accepting of drug and alcohol use for the 50 years I’ve been here.”